Producing Your Presentations with ConTeXt

After using ConTeXt for a while, many users begin to think about producing
their presentations with it, too. ConTeXt is ideally suited for this
task. Here's just a very selective list of the advantages you gain:

The superior typographic quality of TeX and ConTeXt will be available for your presentations. Users doing scientific presentations will also appreciate the well-known mathematical abilities TeX offers.

In addition, ConTeXt has great graphics abilities (placing images and floats) and can make excellent use of color.

Moreover, you can use all of the advanced features of ConTeXt, such as interaction or integration of metafun code.

The material of your presentations can be reused for handouts, papers, notes, etc. If you make use of the Modes feature, you can even recompile your entire presentation in a different format without changing a single line in your source.

As you probably know, ConTeXt produces pdf-output by default; that's a great
advantage when you're thinking about a presentation: you can simply produce a
pdf-file and open it with a viewer such as xpdf or Acrobat Reader and show the
pages in fullscreen mode. This is especially appealing when you want to
distribute your presentations via mail or the web or when you have to show them
on equipment you don't know: while proprietary software may or may not be
available, you can usually be certain that everyone has an application for
displaying pdf-files.

This section of the wiki wants to get you started with presentations in
ConTeXt. There's lots of amazing stuff in the distribution already, such as
truly amazing prebuilt styles for presentations which
you can simply use by typing, e.g.

\usemodule[pre-original]

The styles are fully documented, and you can learn amazing tricks by looking at
the source and the documentation. However, for beginners, it might be easier to
start with a very basic presentation and then slowly add more fancy stuff. This
section is thus targeted at newcomers; more experienced users may want to skip
the first sections. This document deals with presentations that will be shown
with the help of a digital projector, but many elements will be applicable to
interactive screen presentations as well.

Your First Presentation

The first thing you will need to do is adapt the papersize: you need a paper
layout in landscape mode that fits a computer screen. (Actually, this layout is
smaller than a screen, but a pdf-document can be scaled without losing
quality.)

Setting screen dimensions

\setuppapersize[S6][S6]

will set the proper document ratio (3:2) to fit the computer screen.

And you probably do not want any page numbers on your slides:

\setuppagenumbering[state=stop]

Setting the tolerance

Moreover, on slides, you want TeX to be tolerant with its horizontal space
(since you will normally be typesetting not entire paragraphs, but single lines
only, this shouldn't be a problem):

\setuptolerance[verytolerant,stretch]

Full-screen mode

\setupinteractionscreen[option=max]

will cause launcing the PDF document in full-screen mode. In Acrobat you can use CTRL-L to switch between normal and full-screen mode.

Refining the Presentation

OK, this is not too impressive yet. The first thing you will want to do is
adapt the font size. With a paper size of S6, I find a font size of 20pt about
right:

\switchtobodyfont[modern,20pt]

This looks better.

Colors

Next up: colors. Now I'm aware that the use of colors is an immensely personal
choice -- I've seen people present their slides with a dark gray font on a
light gray background, and they seemed very proud of their design. Others use
psychedelic colors that can induce serious sickness. So let's go for a rather
conservative combination of colors. Something I find very readable even in
rooms where the lighting is a bit problematic is a white typeface on a blue
background. So let's add this. Our document will now look like this:

This will give you something to start from. You can now go and build a
presentation with this design: make every slide a new page, use all the ConTeXt
features (such as lists, itemize, tables, math, chemical formulae, etc.) you
want.

Adding fancier effects

Now when you look at your slides, you will certainly feel that there's room for
improvement. There's only a few things I can mention here; for the rest, have a
look at the predefined styles to get some ideas.

First, the background. Something I find very attractive is a background that
has different shades, beginning in a very dark blue at the top and ending in a
noticeably lighter blue at the bottom. Metafun can easily produce such shaded
backgrounds:

What we have done: defined two colors; a is a very light, b a very dark blue.
We let metafun calculate an interpolation between both colors. Try other values
for the colors and be amazed! You can also try to set "p,6" to other values
such as "p,0" or "p,4."

Adding a Footer

Next, the bottom of our slides. If the audience is apt to forget your name, the
title of your talk, and the date, you could include this vital information in
the footer of the page.

\setupfootertexts[{\color[white]{\tfxx\midaligned{\rlap{\currentdate}\hfill TITLE HERE\hfill\llap{YOUR NAME HERE}}}}]

Don't forget to put

\setupfooter[state=start]

into your document where you want the footer to appear first (probably not on
the title of your presentation...).

Adding a Progress Meter

If your audience is able to remember these details, but you suspect they may
be yearning for the end of your presentation, you may want to include a
"progress meter" that highlights how many slides they have seen and how many
more they will have to stand. Put this in your preamble:

Finally, a few things about the placement of pictures. This can be done with
the \framed command. You probably have to try and adjust
different parameters to get exactly what you need, but here's something that
worked for me:

Adding Pictures

In the case of wide pictures, it's fairly easy. You will want them midaligned,
and you'll want them to fill as much space of the area between your title and
the footer as possible:

I found it more difficult to have longish narrow pictures: in that case, I
don't want a title above the picture, but I want it to fill all the vertical
space between the top margin and the footer. I want the text accompanying the
picture opposite it, centered horizontally and vertically. This can be done
with a \startcombination:

This third output would also allow to print a "slide + comment" version of the presentation for the speaker.

The option of texexec could be something like

--pdfonly

instead of --pdf, or simply

--use-javascript=false

In general, I seem to have much more luck with advi then with xdvi for doing slides. It supports all kinds of interactive things. I've been told it can even do plugins (movies and such), but they only have a LaTeX package to support that.

Working Example (for the ones not satisfied with \presentationstep)

Here are some simple macros almost fully satisfying the idea above with SlideWithSteps, shared with the others by Otared Kavian:
[[3]]. David Munger also derived an alternative [[4]] from Otared Kavian's work.